From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (118 page)

The missile crisis widened and exposed these fissures. By first deciding what to do and then informing its allies, the United States confirmed European suspicions of how it would respond to a Soviet threat. France's Charles de Gaulle loyally supported Kennedy during the crisis, but he was more than ever persuaded that his nation must have its
force de frappe
. West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer fretted that Kennedy's post-missile-crisis moves toward the Soviet Union would mean the end of German unification. The Europeans soon took actions that shook the alliance to its core. De Gaulle vetoed British entry into the Common Market and rejected the MLF in favor of his own nuclear program. In a shocking reversal of long-standing trends, France signed a friendship treaty with West Germany, portending an independent European position in world affairs, even West German acquisition of nuclear weapons. With the U.S. balance of payments deficit soaring, Washington considered troop withdrawals. In late 1963, West Germany veered back toward the United States by continuing its offset purchases, but de Gaulle persisted in his independent path. He would soon challenge U.S. leadership in Europe and elsewhere.
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The myth of a Sino-Soviet "bloc" was also starkly exposed. The Chinese denounced Khrushchev's "adventurism" in provoking the missile crisis and "capitulationism" in ending it, and in late 1962 the long-hidden dispute between the two Communist powers burst out into the open. In time, the rift would open tempting opportunities for the United States, but at the outset Americans questioned how deep it ran and whether it was irreparable. Indeed, the growth of multipolarity after the missile crisis along with the first steps toward detente and growing nuclear proliferation made for a more complex and in some ways more dangerous world.

The major immediate effect was to heighten U.S.-Chinese tensions. In part because of its conflict with the USSR, Mao's regime seemed the more militant of the Communist powers, and its strident rhetoric bespoke an unbending commitment to world revolution. Indications that it would soon get the bomb heightened American fears, even leading to lower-level discussion in Washington and Moscow of a preemptive attack against China's
nuclear facilities. United States officials took Beijing's rhetoric more seriously than they might have and exaggerated its ability to topple governments. For reasons of domestic politics as well as Cold War conviction, JFK never seriously considered changes in the U.S. policy of containing and isolating China. Demonization of China had the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Kennedy administration may also have used anti-Chinese rhetoric to cover its domestic flank while seeking improved relations with the USSR. Although ambassadorial talks would continue at Warsaw, China would be for Washington Cold War Enemy No. 1. The focal point of conflict would be Southeast Asia in general and Vietnam in particular.
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Kennedy's handling of the last foreign policy crisis of his presidency reflected his post-missile-crisis ambivalence. By 1961, Eisenhower's nation-building experiment in Vietnam was in tatters. Frustrated by President Ngo Dinh Diem's refusal to hold the elections called for by the Geneva Accords, former Vietminh remaining in the South began to re-create in 1957 the revolutionary networks used against France. They effectively exploited the rising rural opposition to Diem's oppressive methods—the peasants were like a "mound of straw ready to be ignited," one insurgent recalled.
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After months of hesitation, North Vietnam in 1959 firmly committed itself to the rebellion, sending men and supplies southward along what would be called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1960, the insurgents coalesced into the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) and shifted from hit-and-run attacks to full-scale military operations. By year's end, the U.S. ambassador warned Washington that unless Diem took prompt and drastic steps to win the war and broaden his popular support it should look for "alternative leadership."
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Although preoccupied with other issues and concerned about the obvious deficiencies in Diem's leadership, JFK in late 1961 sharply escalated the U.S. commitment. Taking a cautious middle ground here as elsewhere, he rejected proposals to seek a negotiated settlement or to commit U.S. combat troops. After Laos, the Bay of Pigs, and Berlin, however, he felt compelled to do something, and he believed that the United States must show it could counter Communist-inspired wars of national liberation. He increased the number of U.S. advisers from nine hundred when
he took office to more than eleven thousand by the end of 1962. The "advisers" took an active role in combat and suffered casualties. Military aid doubled and included such modern hardware as armored personnel carriers and aircraft. Although increasingly concerned about Diem's ability to defeat the insurgency, the administration rejected as too risky proposals to condition expanded U.S. aid on major reforms. "Diem is Diem and the best we've got," JFK ruefully admitted.
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Kennedy's escalation failed to blunt the insurgency. The South Vietnamese army could not gain the initiative. The elusive guerrillas were difficult to locate and fought only when they had the upper hand. Skillfully blending intimidation with inducements such as land reform, they expanded their control of the South Vietnamese countryside. Diem resisted reforms and refused to broaden his government. The more embattled he became, the more he isolated himself in the presidential palace. As the U.S. presence became more intrusive, tensions between Americans and South Vietnamese increased.
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Vietnam became a full-fledged crisis in the summer of 1963 when the Catholic-dominated Saigon regime's harassment of South Vietnam's Buddhist majority provoked outright rebellion in the cities. The uprising drew international attention in June when an elderly monk immolated himself in front of large, shrieking crowds at a busy intersection in downtown Saigon. Pictures of the monk engulfed in flames appeared on television screens and in newspapers across the world. Diem's subsequent refusal to conciliate the Buddhists drove a bitterly divided administration to a fateful decision: He must go. With a green light from Washington, army generals on November 1, 1963, seized power. Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu fled to a Catholic church, where they were captured; they were later brutally murdered in the back of an armored personnel carrier. Kennedy found the murders especially distressing. More depressed than at any time since the Bay of Pigs, he realized that Vietnam had been his greatest foreign policy failure.
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Just three weeks later, JFK himself was assassinated in Dallas, and his sudden and shocking death had an enormous international impact, a symbol of his own magnetic personality and America's global position. He and his stylish wife, Jacqueline, had assumed a position akin to international royalty. The president drew huge and enthusiastic crowds in state visits to Mexico, Colombia, and even Venezuela, where Nixon had
been so rudely treated in 1958. A trip to Europe in the summer of 1963 established him as an extraordinarily popular figure who attracted strong support for himself and his country.
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Kennedy's assassination was perhaps "the first truly global instant of tragedy," historian Warren Bass has written.
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Through the miracle of satellite transmission, the events of that awful weekend were beamed far and wide on television and evoked an outpouring of emotion. In the Middle East and Latin America, ordinary people stood in line for hours to sign condolence books at U.S. embassies. Europeans viewed him as
their
leader and felt a keen sense of personal loss. His life and the horror of his death symbolized for them what was good and bad about the United States.
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JFK's handling of Vietnam reflects the ambiguous and uncertain legacy of his thousand days in office. Some of his advisers, later echoed by scholars, have claimed that he planned after reelection in 1964 to extricate the United States from what he had concluded was a quagmire. Americans find such arguments comforting, but they rest more on conjecture than on evidence.
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Kennedy had developed profound doubts about the prospects for success in South Vietnam. From the start of his presidency, he had adamantly opposed sending combat troops there. He had grown increasingly skeptical of his military advisers. On numerous issues, he had demonstrated flexibility. He had grown demonstrably in office. A good case can be made that when faced with the collapse of South Vietnam in 1964–65, he would have looked closely at diplomatic solutions.
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But there is no persuasive evidence that he was committed to withdrawal. He had resisted negotiations as firmly as he had opposed combat troops. At his direction, the Defense Department had developed a plan for the phased withdrawal of U.S. troops by 1965, but it was contingent on progress in South Vietnam. In a speech to be given in Dallas on the day of his death, he conceded that Third World commitments could be "painful, risky, and costly," but, he added, "we dare not weary of the test."
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As with Cuba and
broader Cold War issues, JFK appears not to have decided which way to go on Vietnam. Apparently convinced that the military situation was not going badly, he clung to hope that the problem might still resolve itself without drastic U.S. action.

In Vietnam, as elsewhere, Kennedy must be judged on the basis of what he did during his brief tenure in office. He and most of his advisers uncritically accepted the assumption that a non-Communist South Vietnam was vital to America's global interests. Their rhetoric in fact strengthened the hold of that assumption. That he never devoted his full attention to Vietnam seems clear. He reacted to crises and improvised responses on a day-to-day basis, seldom examining the implications of his actions. Although apparently troubled by growing doubts, he refused, even after the problems with Diem had reached a crisis point, to face the hard questions. His cautious middle course significantly enlarged the U.S. role in Vietnam. With the coup, the United States assumed direct responsibility for the Saigon government. Whatever his misgivings and ultimate intentions, JFK bequeathed to his successor a problem eminently more dangerous than the one he had inherited.

French president de Gaulle once remarked that Lyndon Johnson was "the very portrait of America. He reveals the country to us as it is, rough and raw."
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By any standard, LBJ was an extraordinary individual. A large man with oversize and eminently caricaturable features, he had ambitions the size of his native Texas, and insecurities to match. He was a driven man, single-minded, prodigiously energetic, at times overbearing, proud, and vain. In some ways, he fits political scientist Walter Russell Mead's Jacksonian diplomatic style, a product of the hinterland, parochial, strongly nationalistic, deeply concerned about honor and reputation, suspicious of other peoples and nations and especially of international institutions, committed to a strong national defense—particularly when it benefited Texas.
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Like the Wilson of 1913, he would have preferred to focus on domestic reform. He lacked his predecessor's and successor's passion for foreign policy. He could be ill at ease with diplomacy and diplomats:
"Foreigners are not like the folks I am used to," he once commented only half-jokingly.
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He had traveled abroad little before becoming vice president and was given to stereotyping other people. The Germans, he once said, were a "great people" but "stingy as hell."
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He was capable of decidedly undiplomatic behavior, as when he plopped cowboy hats on visiting Japanese dignitaries or dressed down West German chancellor Ludwig Erhard in a way that appalled his aides. He was also extremely intelligent and knowledgeable about key issues. He had an uncanny ability to size up people. A strong streak of idealism drove him to do good in the world. Robert Kennedy, no shrinking violet himself, called his rival and sometimes bitter enemy "the most formidable human being I've ever met."
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Sensitive to charges that he lacked experience in foreign policy and determined to maintain continuity with Kennedy's policies, LBJ retained and relied heavily on his predecessor's advisers. He established especially close ties with McNamara and Rusk. Like their boss, both were workaholics. At least in the beginning, the president stood in awe of McNamara's brains, energy, and drive. "He's like a jackhammer," an admiring LBJ remarked. "He drills through granite rock until he's there." Johnson and Rusk shared southern roots, and both had been outcasts in Kennedy's "Camelot." They drew much closer during an increasingly embattled presidency. "Hardworking, bright, and loyal as a beagle" is the way LBJ praised his stolid and utterly reliable secretary of state.
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Bundy and Johnson were never personally close, but the national security adviser had reshaped the NSC into the focal point of decision-making and was thus indispensable. LBJ preferred a more formal, orderly style to JFK's freewheeling approach. Much of the work was done by the "principals" in small, intimate White House lunches, usually on Tuesday, more suitable for frank discussions and less susceptible to leaks (except for the leaker in chief, LBJ himself).
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The Sino-Soviet split widened into an irreparable breach by the mid-1960s, solidifying the triangular nature of the Cold War. Like the United States, the USSR felt an urgent need to ease tensions and stabilize the great-power rivalry. The new collective leadership that sent Khrushchev into involuntary retirement in late 1964 also sought to appease an increasingly restless public with better living standards. Moscow thus toned down the rhetoric and opened itself to dialogue on some major issues. On
the other hand, old shibboleths died hard, and segments of the Soviet bureaucracy were vested in the Cold War. The new leaders mounted a huge defense buildup. Divided among themselves, without foreign policy experience, they moved both ways at once, hesitating to veer too far in any direction.
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